Doctors or Healthcare Workers: How to Stay Stress-Free at Work?
May 5, 2021When you look at most of your peers in the hospital, how many doctors would you say are living a stress-free day? Would the number be around 10% or a little higher? Maybe 20% or 40%? How confident are you about this conclusion?
The idea is not to judge your peers’ stress in your hospital or specialty. Instead, the key point is that you are not alone. Many doctors face workplace stress. However, in the rush of handling appointments and emergencies, the reality of stressed doctors often gets overlooked.
Now, for a second, imagine a professional who has to deal with the following:
- Long Hours at Work: This professional easily puts in 60 to 100 hours per week, usually more.
- Deal with Emotional Duress: This professional is surrounded by various emotions. She/he is often the ray of hope but can also be the bearer of bad news. No matter what, she/he has to keep her composure and poise intact – every day.
- Unpredictable Schedule: This professional has defined work hours. However, her nature of work means that she/he can get a call in the middle of the night after a tiring day, and she/he is expected to respond since it might be a matter of life or death.
- Pressure to Perform Consistently: She/he is expected to perform consistently day in and day out. That is one reason why she/he is considered the best in her/his area of work.
By now, you can imagine an average workweek filled with long hours, emotional stress, unpredictable schedules, and pressure to perform consistently. This is the reality of being a doctor. It is a noble and vital profession, but it takes a toll on those in the field. Often, that toll manifests as stress.
This post is about defining, identifying, and mitigating stress, the beast that stands between a doctor’s work-life balance and the satisfaction she/he can receive by being stress-free at work.
How to Define Stress?
Stress is a universal issue. Academic studies in physics and organizational psychology help us understand its nature. Understanding stress is the first step to managing it. This process is similar to diagnosis— to cure a disease, you must first identify and define it.
The challenge with stress is that many definitions exist. Doctors experience both general stress and workplace stress. Each type has its own nuances that are important to consider.
The Cleveland Clinic highlights stress as a normal phenomenon, which is the body’s response to an external stimulus, often referred to as a ‘stressor.’ Every time the body encounters a stressor, it releases the response. This response often includes the nervous response taking control and increasing your heart rate, breathing rhythm, and vision. This leads to a quick response when you face danger, creating the “fight or flight” reaction. Such stress is everyday and can boost your performance in critical situations, like being chased by a tiger or handling an emergency with a losing consciousness patient.
When stress lasts a long time, it becomes a serious problem. Chronic stress can cause physical issues like chest pain, fast heartbeats, dizziness, tiredness, trouble sleeping, high blood pressure, weaker immunity, loss of libido, and stomach problems. It can also lead to depression, panic attacks, and anxiety.
Workplace stress is another type of stress. The American Psychological Association defines it as stress from work-related events. These include too much work, few chances for growth, constant challenges, lack of control over job choices, and unclear demands. Many of these problems are common in doctors’ daily work.
When workplace stress combines with chronic stress, it shows how many doctors risk serious physical and mental health issues if they do not manage their stress.
Unhealthy Methods to Deal with Stress
Dealing with stress can be a rather lonely task since only doctors can understand the pressure of being a doctor. And taking up cues from only your peers might not be the best practice for every doctor dealing with stress. Hence, these are the unhealthy methods often used by doctors to deal with stress. It should be noted that the common denominator between these methods is that they exacerbate the impact of stressors in the long run.
Ignorance and Avoidance.
Some doctors take it personally and might conflate stress with a lack of competence. Doctors often cite, “If you cannot deal with stress, you have chosen the wrong line of work,” as a way to escape workplace stress. Such responses come from a place of fear.
Reactive Responses.
These erupt in the form of changes in temperament. If they allow these responses to become their go-to for stress, the doctor may develop anger issues over time.
Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms – Excessive Eating, Substance Abuse, and Alcohol Addiction.
Such mechanisms give a temporary sense of relief but do not solve the problem. Medical professionals engaging in such activities make it more difficult for themselves to deal with stress and might even be putting their patients’ lives at risk with sub-optimal decision-making fogged by such addictions.
How to Mitigate Stress in a Healthy Manner?
The way modern medicine, its delivery, and its industry have evolved would mean that most doctors will not have control over their external environment. You will still have to respond to emergency calls, have long working hours, and might not be able to control your day with great force. That said – you can develop strategies to mitigate and manage risk.
1. Make a Journal of Stressors.
Most guides on managing stress would begin with exercising, meditation, and yoga as coping mechanisms. While these are healthy steps, your first step should be to create a detailed journal of your day at work.
Take an inventory of emergencies, people, and physical settings, as well as your reaction to such situations. Take account of details like an insubordinate associate or your food with extra butter. After you have enough data points in a few weeks, you will see patterns in stressors and your reactions to such sources. Begin with addressing these and determine the common and frequent stressors.
2. Develop a Healthy Coping Mechanism.
Now that you know the everyday stressors in your routine, you can build habits that make you more mindful, strong, and patient. Mindfulness meditation, exercise, sports, and yoga are good ways to develop healthy coping skills. Many public sources provide more information on these topics. Here are some to help you start: yoga for beginners, workouts, and mindfulness meditation.
3. Draw Lines Between Work and Personal Life.
Stress can grow beyond the pressure applied by the stressor if its impact is realized in your personal life. You attended to more patients today and had an unnecessary argument at home. You had to pass on morbid news in the hospital and skipped an important family event in the week. These might seem to be unrelated events, but the correlation is causality.
As a doctor, both your personal and professional life are important to keep a healthy mind at work. And if you are unable to compartmentalize both areas of your life, it can become challenging to deal with stress right when the stressor is present. You can visualize this as an exercise in minimizing collateral damage – if it did not happen in that room, you should not exert a reaction.
4. Talk to People Who Can Help You – Supervisors, Friends & Family, and Professionals.
You may not control many stressors at work, but you can adopt healthier habits to manage them. If work tests your patience daily, talk to your supervisor about your schedule. Sharing your stress with friends and family can help you get support and manage expectations.
Finally, think about what happens if patients with a broken bone try to fix it themselves without training instead of seeing an orthopedic specialist. While fractures and stress differ, professionals can help you recover and teach you healthy habits for a smoother experience.
Conclusion
Stress is not easy to spot like a tumor or headache, so recognizing it can be hard. Journaling is a good way to track your feelings. Once you know your stressors and how you react, you can build healthier coping skills like meditation, yoga, exercise, and sports. Keep your work and personal life separate to reduce stress. Also, talk to friends and family or seek professional help.
Remember the fact that you are directly responsible for healing and saving lives. Hence, it is your responsibility to ensure you are bringing a mind trained to identify and manage stress for delivering healthcare that people need around you.